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Not my cabbie's cell phone

The "Cash Cab" is not the only taxi in New York City with a camera in it. While taxis have the option to install security cams (made by Honeywell, VerifEye or Cygnus), the camera you can definitely count on is that in your driver's cell phone. I was reminded of this late Friday night, when my taxi driver exposed me to something that I've termed "cabbie porn."

I was (appropriately) returning from the Hyperpublic Conference at Harvard's Berkman Center, arriving by train at Penn Station around 2:30 a.m. Saturday morning. I struck up a conversation with my cabbie, who told me he'd originally come to the States from Bangladesh on a consulting contract with an Internet company. When he discovered that I was a journalist, he said that his backseat was a launching pad for many crazy tales. That's when the ride turned into a reverse Taxicab Confessional. "Oh yeah, like what?" I asked. "Take a look at this," he said, showing me his phone. "Is that a man's arm bleeding?" I asked. "No, look more closely," he said, handing me the phone.

What I had taken for blood was actually a red thong. A woman was sitting on the lap of her companion, facing him, and his arm was down the back of her pants. My cabbie had taken the photo from the front seat of the vehicle. "Here's another one," he proffered, offering up a photo of a woman sleeping on the back seat, her head in her male friend's lap. He, meanwhile, had lifted her shirt, and pulled her bra down, and was absentmindedly playing with her breasts. Faces were clearly visible, unlike the thong photo, though I did not recognize the amateur porn star passengers. (Good thing for them that facial recognition technology is not universal yet).

I'm now counting the seconds until he starts a "Cabbie Porn" Tumblr page...

There's lots of precedent for those in the service industry tattling on the bad behavior of their patrons, such as doormen blogging their funny stories about their residents and a Brooklyn deliveryman squealing on terrible tippers. We tend to move through the world assuming anonymity, forgetting that an observant stranger can wind up invading our privacy far more easily than a corporate or government actor.

With everyone armed with cameras now, it's far more risky to "let it all hang out" in public. But we're still adjusting to the fact that the backseat of a taxi is a public space. Anywhere with another person (especially one with a smartphone) is a place where you're one tweet, blog post, or status update away from the world stage that is the Internet. "We’re understandably uneasy about technology that pops the anonymity bubble we’ve been living in over the past century — an anonymity bubble that’s been inflating along with the population density of our cities," writes Jim Adler, the chief privacy officer for Intelius. "Social networking and big data are returning our dense, anonymous cities back to small towns."

So, behave yourself in the back of the cab, folks. And if you don't, make sure to give the cabbie a very generous tip.